Biography

Dr. Nahel Elias is a multi-organ abdominal transplant surgeon dedicated to kidney, liver, and pancreas recipients' care. He attended University of Damascus, Syria (MD 1994), and McGill (Montreal) as a Transplant Research Fellow prior to General Surgery residency in Michigan '97-'02, and the MGH Multi-Organ abdominal Transplant Surgery fellowship '02-'04, then joined MGH Transplant Surgery staff . Since then, Dr. Elias has developed protocols supporting solutions to organ shortage; including ICUs, operating room, and New England Organ Bank collaboration advancing donation programs at regional hospitals. He has evolved the transplant database, and chairs the MGH Transplant Center Quality Assessment and Performance Improvement since 2008.

In 2012 Dr. Elias became Surgical Director of Kidney Transplantation, and the program has progressed greatly since. Its volume has surpassed other regional programs and maintained excellent results. It continues to improve and address patient's needs and satisfaction.

Additional to performing and caring for liver and kidney transplant, Dr. Elias also treates patients with liver cancer (hepato-cellular carcinoma), through the Cancer Center's multi-disciplinary liver cancer clinic since its inception, both as a transplant surgeon and a hepato-biliary surgeon. His skills in surgical care provide many options to his patients with liver disease, including transplantation, as well as other hepato-biliary and portal hypertension procedures.

Dr. Elias teaches medical students, residents, and fellows, and is the director of a Harvard Medical School course on transplant surgery. He also speaks frequently locally, nationally, and internationally about Transplantation, conducts research on Immuno-suppression, and hepatitis C management, and has contributed to the medical literature. He has won many awards and is a member of many Surgical and transplant societies.

Research & Publications

News & Events

In 2015, Mary Anne Gauthier of Nashua, New Hampshire, received a series of devastating diagnoses. The retired professor of nursing, who taught at Northeastern University and ran its undergraduate nursing program for nearly two decades, knew something was wrong.

Each day, twenty-two people in the US die waiting for an organ. Although a majority of Americans support organ donation, only a fraction are registered as organ donors. With so many lives as stake, we must ask: Should organs be sold?